Enriched bleached wheat flour (bleached flour, malted barley flour, niacin, ferrous sulfate, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid): This is bleached malted flour with the standard iron and Vitamin B package as is required by law in the U.S. to be included in flours. I believe the same is true where you are in Canada. Since “wheat flour” can be just about any flour made from wheat, we don’t know whether the flour is all-purpose flour, bread flour, or high-gluten flour. One would have to do some additional research to determine which it is.

Whey is a byproduct of cheese production. A dried and processed form is usually used in baked goods. What PH is most likely using is a baker’s grade of dried dairy whey. In the U.S., Bob’s Red Mill sells a dried dairy whey that I was told is baker’s grade. It is available at the retail level in the U.S. in many upscale food markets. Whey is usually used to produce better crust coloration. It is high in lactose, a milk sugar, but it has a low sweetness factor. It is also not used by the yeast for food so it remains in the dough as residual sugar to contribute to crust coloration.

Enzymes: I have no idea as to what enzymes might be used although there is a fungal amylase enzyme and diastatic malt that is sometimes used in flour to increase the amylase enzyme performance in converting starch to sugar for use as food by the yeast and for other purposes. Diastatic malt is also sold by Bob's Red Mill, and others.

DATEM is an emulsifier that interacts with the gluten in dough to strengthen it. It is not a product sold at the retail level. It’s possible that a bakery supply company may sell it or one might have to go to a manufacturer of the product. When used, I have read that the amount to use is about 0.375-0.5% of the weight of flour. Unless you can get a sample quantity, you are unlikely to be able to get it in a user-friendly quantity.

Vital wheat gluten is a protein product with which you are already familiar as a result of your supplementation of Canadian flours with VWG.

Ascorbic acid is Vitamin C, which can be obtained in powdered form, or else a Vitamin C tablet can be crushed to a powdered form. Many flours routinely come with ascorbic acid. It is used to strengthen the dough and to get increased volume.

Sodium stearoyl lactylate is an emulsifier that is commonly used in baked goods. I have no idea where it can be purchased.

Potassium sorbate is a food preservative. Again, I don’t know where you would purchase it.

I believe the rest of the dough ingredients are pretty much self-explanatory. The citric acid in the sauce might be an added ingredient but it very often comes with the canned tomato products used to make the sauce.

For your purposes, I would concentrate on the basic ingredients of flour (a bleached and malted flour with the standard enrichment package), water, yeast, salt, sugar, soybean and/or cottonseed oil, whey, vital wheat gluten, and ascorbic acid (if there is none in the flour already). I don’t think I would worry about the rest of the ingredients. To make use of the above ingredients, you will have to come up with a dough formulation and determine the requisite amount of dough to make a PH pan pizza clone. For background purposes, you may want to take a look at this thread: http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,4067.0.html.

My early attempts at pizza also ended up like bread until I found this site and changed the way I let the dough ferment. Initially I was mixing the dough and using it right away. Now every dough I make ends up in the refrigerator for a few days at least and it is much better. I have never worked at PH, but did work at another national chain many years ago and the pan dough was mixed on day one and portioned into single pizza sized dough balls and placed in the refrigerator. On day two they were removed, sheeted (rolled out) and placed in an oiled pan. The pans were then returned to the cooler until day three when they were used or discarded (although they could have probably been used on day 4 or 5 also). They were allowed to warm to room temp before being used. Just these steps alone could make a big difference for you. I don't know what is happening scientifically to the dough over these 48 hours, but it seems to change the texture from bread to pizza crust.

Back when I was 16 I worked at a pizza place call Pizza Delight. Back when I worked there they made a crust was almost identical to Pizza Hut. The dough was all made in the morning in the basement then put directly in pans then the pans were put into re-usable bags and left for most of the day on racks in the basement where in the summer it would be 80+ degrees. Near about 4:00 in the afternoon the pans were stacked in the cooler and used that evening or the next day then thrown out. The crust style at this franchise has changed for the worse in recent years but I have always wanted to make something similar. The pans were pulled from the cooler, sauced immediately and put in a conveyor oven at what I remember being 475 degrees. I wish I had been more involved with the dough making back then or at least looked at the bags of flour on the floor in the basement but alas I did not.

I believe there may be more to the story than I reported in my last post. After I posted last night, I stared at the dough ingredients list you posted for several minutes because I couldn't figure out why the yeast was so high up in the list. It just didn't make sense that the yeast would be used in larger quantity (by weight) than all of the other ingredients below it in the list. It finally dawned on me that the dough list you posted may be for a frozen dough. That would be consistent with what I have read that PH is now shipping frozen doughs into most of their stores (for example, see the PMQ Think Tank posts at http://thinktank.pmq.com/viewtopic.php?p=17681#17681).

The PH ingredients list seems to fit the frozen dough profile. Typically the amount of yeast used for frozen doughs is increased substantially above normal levels--by double or triple in many cases. The increase in the amount of yeast is to compensate for the loss of yeast cells during the freezing process, even at very low flash-frozen temperatures that are less harmful to the yeast than static freezing. I might add that DATEM, vital wheat gluten and ascorbic acid are also commonly used in frozen doughs to strengthen the dough and gluten structure so that there is good volume expansion after the dough is defrosted and, in the case of pan pizza doughs, proofed. Typically, the hydration is also increased for a frozen dough. I don't know if PH is making and freezing the doughs themselves, or whether the dough production is being contracted out to third parties, but the pizza dough products they are shipping into their stores are like the frozen bread doughs that are shipped into supermarkets to be defrosted and baked and turned into "artisan" loaves. If you look at the labels of those breads sometime (as I routinely do), you will frequently see DATEM, vital wheat gluten, ascorbic acid and many other dough additives, conditioners and preservatives in the ingredients list.

If my analysis is correct, I would place the yeast far down the list of ingredients for a dough that is to be made fresh and not frozen. The amount of yeast to use would be largely governed by how the dough is to be fermented (e.g., at room temperature or in the cooler, or both) and for what duration. In your case, you might start with a Robin Hood or Five Roses flour, use a hydration of around 58%, salt at around 1.75%, and use decreasing percentages (by weight of flour) for the rest of the ingredients (sugar, oil, whey, and vital wheat gluten). You could add a pinch of ascorbic acid if you'd like. For dough quantity, I would use the amount that PH uses for doughs made in their stores (discussed in the post I referenced in my last post), rather than the frozen variety that are apparently being shipped into the PH stores.

For my next attempt I'm going to try a room temperature rise in the pan. For a long room temperature rise (like 8 hours) how much yeast should I use? I'm going attempt something with all purpose flour, Bob's Redmill powered milk, a bunch of oil, ect and see how it goes.

The crispy but not oil saturated crust bottom is what I want to achieve. Every time I try so far I end up saturating the dough with oil or end up with something closer to a loaf of bread

I know this may be some redundant information, but I can confirm that in 1994 PH was shipping all of the personal pan pizza doughs in frozen disk form. Emergencies were made from fresh dough. Also I will never forget that there was 1/2/3 ounces of oil in the small/medium/large pans respectively. I have made the pan clone from the recipe page before and thought it to be VERY similar to the PH pan pizza. I think there was was a bit too much dough/crust but the texture was there. I think this part has been solved in some of the older posts. Here are the pictures from that attempt. This was 3 ounces of oil and it was not unlike the original. good luck -marc

For a long room temperature rise (like 8 hours) how much yeast should I use?

turbosundance,

That's a hard question to answer in the abstract without knowing what dough formulation you plan to use, the total amount of dough you plan to make, and the room temperature where you are in Canada. Do you have a particular dough formulation and dough weight in mind? And a particular pan size? It sounds like you are planning to make the dough, roll it out, and place the rolled-out dough into the pan and let it rise over the eight-hour period before dressing and baking. Is that correct? From what you have said, it sounds like you do not plan to replicate the Pizza Hut dough. At one point, PH was using 22 ounces of dough for a 14" pan (with the rolled-out dough being 12" in diameter, I believe).

If you were making a simple dough with only flour, water, salt and yeast, it would take only a small amount of yeast to have the dough double during an eight-hour room temperature fermentation. The yeast could be a fraction of a teaspoon. However, if you use a lot of salt, oil or sugar, or if it is on the cool side in your kitchen, you most likely will need more than that. Have you settled on what kind of yeast you will be using, i.e., fresh, ADY or IDY?

I am planning on trying at 14" pan pizza. The dough will be left to rise for roughly 8 hours in the pan in a room that is roughly 17 degrees celcius (62) (basement). I think I will use shortening in the pan as opposed to oil to avoid saturating the dough while is rises in the pan. I will leave it covered with plastic rap all day.

I did some rough calculations on the yeast and I came up with around 1/3 t. of IDY for the amount of flour you plan to use. What I don’t know is how much effect the amount of oil you plan to use will have on the yeast’s performance, and whether you should use more yeast as a result. For example, when I have made deep-dish doughs with a lot of oil, usually above eight percent by weight of flour, it seemed to me that I needed more yeast than for other types of doughs with less oil. If you have the luxury of being around while the dough ferments, you may be able to get a better idea as to whether more yeast will be required the next time.

As for substituting shortening for oil in the pan, you may want to keep in mind that doing so may produce a different effect than using oil. Tom Lehmann discussed some of these effects at a post at the PMQ Think Tank at http://thinktank.pmq.com/viewtopic.php?p=6662#6662. I suspect that PH uses oil because of convenience and cost. It has been my understanding that it is the “fried” effect that oil produces that appeals to its customers.

The only other suggestion I have at the moment is to consider using a bowl residue compensation of around 1.5% to compensate for minor dough losses during preparation. Doing this might get you closer to 22 ounces of dough, which is the amount that PH has used in the past for the 14” pan. Otherwise, your final dough weight might fall below the 21.16 ounces in the dough formulation you posted.

I know this may be some redundant information, but I can confirm that in 1994 PH was shipping all of the personal pan pizza doughs in frozen disk form.

On Pizza Hut's nutrician guide there are different ingredients listed for the regular pan pizza compared to the Person Pan Pizza. At the time I had assumed that only the Personal Pan Pizza used forzen dough. If all of their pan dough is frozen then I dont know why they would use different ingredients for the personal pizza

It often happens that the foreign subsidiaries of the big U.S. pizza chains sell different products than sold in the U.S. In my analysis, I looked at the nutrition data for PH's U.S. dough products, at http://www.pizzahut.com/Files/PDF/PIZZA%20HUT%20INGREDIENT%20STATEMENTS%202008.pdf. As you will note from that document, the only pizza product that is not loaded with additives, preservatives and conditioners is the dough for the thin and crispy pizzas. I believe the reason is that the bases for the thin and crispy pizzas are par-baked. Since they are not made from frozen dough, there is no reason to include all of the chemicals that one would use for frozen doughs. Domino's does the same thing for their thin and crispy product. The bases are par-baked and delivered to their stores and refrigerated or frozen until ready to be used.

It's possible that in Canada not all of the stores have switched to all or mostly frozen products yet. To be complete, the PH nutrition and ingredients lists in Canada would have to cover all cases, including fresh and frozen. From the information you provided, it looks like premixes are still being used in some stores to make the fresh pan doughs. They might be phased out down the line.

In the course of doing some research on Pizza Hut pan pizzas recently, I found the complete list of ingredients quoted above, at http://www.espanol.pizzahut.com/menu/nutritioninfo/documents/ph_ingredients.pdf (dated July 29, 2004). It will be noted that "water" was apparently omitted in the list of ingredients, as it was in elsegundo's recitation of ingredients also. Also, "nonfat mild" should be "nonfat milk". If I had to guess, the Pan Dough product is not of the frozen variety. If I were to develop a clone of a Pizza Hut Pan Dough, I think I would go with the fresh variety, not the frozen one now being used, and substitute sugar or honey or maple syrup or something similar for the fructose. My recollection is that members who have tried the most recent pan pizzas made by Pizza Hut have not been impressed and have yearned for the original pan pizzas made by Pizza Hut several years ago.